Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
dawn of the city
Uruk, 4000–1900 bc
Enkidu lives in harmony with nature. Strong as a “rock from the sky” and possessing godlike beauty, his heart delights as he runs free with the wild animals. That is until he sees the naked figure of Shamat bathing at the waterhole. Entranced by his first sight of a woman, Enkidu makes love to Shamat for six days and seven nights.
Sated by their unbridled, rapturous sexual union, Enkidu attempts to return to the freedom of the wilderness. But his power over nature has faded. The beasts shun him; his strength is diminished; and he feels pangs of loneliness for the first time. Confused, he returns to Shamat. She tells her lover about her home, the fabled city of Uruk, a place of monumental buildings, shady palm groves and great throngs of humanity behind mighty walls. In the city men labour with their brains, not just their brawn. The people wear gorgeous clothing and every day there is a festival, when “drums rap out the beat.” And there are the most beautiful women in the world, “graced with charm and full of delights.” Shamat teaches Enkidu how to eat bread and drink ale. In the city, Shamat tells Enkidu, his godlike potential will be translated into real power. His hairy body shaved, his skin anointed with oils, and his nakedness concealed under costly garments, Enkidu sets off for Uruk. He has renounced the freedom and instincts of nature, drawn to the city by the lure of sex, food and luxury.
Cities from Uruk and Babylon to Rome, Teotihuacan and Byzantium, from Baghdad and Venice to Paris, New York and Shanghai, have bedazzled people as the idealised cities of the imagination made real, the pinnacles of human creativity. Enkidu represents mankind in a pristine state of nature, forced to choose between the freedom of the wild and the artificiality of the city. Shamat is the personification of sophisticated urban culture. Like her, such cities beguile and seduce; they promise the realisation of our powers and potential.1
The tale of Enkidu comes at the beginning of The Epic of Gilgamesh, humankind’s oldest surviving work of literature, its written form dating back to at least 2100 bc. The epic was the product of the literate, highly urbanised Sumerian people, who lived in Mesopotamia, now known as Iraq. Someone approaching Uruk for the first time at its height in about 3000 bc, like the fictional Enkidu, would have had their senses assaulted. With a population of between 50,000 and 80,000 and occupying three square miles, Uruk was the most densely populated place on the planet. Like an anthill, the city sat atop a mound created by generations’ worth of activity, layers of garbage and discarded building materials creating a man-made acropolis dominating the horizontal plains and visible for miles.
Long before reaching the city you would have become aware of its presence. Uruk had cultivated the surrounding area, harnessing the countryside to serve its needs. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of fields, artificially irrigated by ditches, produced the wheat, sheep and dates that fed the metropolis and the barley that provided beer for the masses.
Most stunning of all were the towering temples dedicated to the goddess of love and war, Eanna, and to Anu, god of the sky, constructed on gigantic platforms high above the city. Like the bell towers and domes of Florence or the forest of skyscrapers in twenty-first-century Shanghai, they were an unmistakable visual signature. Built with limestone and covered with gypsum plaster, Anu’s great White Temple reflected the light of the sun as impressively as any modern skyscraper. A beacon in the plains, it radiated a message of civilisation and power.
For the ancient Mesopotamians, the city represented humankind’s triumph over nature; the domineering artificial landscape made that strikingly clear. The city walls, studded with gates and projecting towers, were nine kilometres in circumference and seven metres tall. Enter through one of the gates and you would see immediately the way in which the city’s inhabitants had won their own victory over nature. Surrounding the city proper were neat gardens producing fruit, herbs and vegetables. An extensive network of canals brought water from the Euphrates to the heart of the city. A subterranean system of clay pipes discharged the waste of tens of thousands of people outside the walls. The gardens and date palms gave way in due course to the inner city. The labyrinths of narrow, twisting streets and alleys crowded with small, windowless houses might have looked horrendously cramped and offered few open spaces, but this layout was designed to create an urban microclimate in which the shade and breeze offered by the narrowness of the streets and the density of the housing mitigated the intensity of the Mesopotamian sun.2
Noisy, cramped, busy, Uruk and its sister cities in Mesopotamia were unique on the face of the earth. In a work of literature from about the same time as The Epic of Gilgamesh the author imagines the goddess Inanna ensuring that
the warehouses would be provisioned; that dwellings would be founded in the city; that its people would eat splendid food; that its people would drink splendid beverages; that those bathed for holidays would rejoice in the courtyards; that the people would throng the places of celebration; that acquaintances would dine together; that foreigners would cruise together about like unusual birds in the sky . . . that monkeys, mighty elephants, water buffalo, exotic animals, as well as thoroughbred dogs, lions, mountain ibexes, and alum sheep with long wool would jostle each other in the public squares.
The writer goes on to portray a city with huge granaries for wheat and silos of gold, silver, copper, tin and lapis lazuli. All the good things of the world flowed to the city for the enjoyment of the people in this highly idealised account. Meanwhile, “inside the city tigi drums sounded; outside it, flutes and zamzam instruments. Its harbour where ships moored was full of joy.”3
“Uruk” means simply “the city.” It was the world’s first city and for over 1,000 years its most powerful urban centre. When people clustered into vast communities things changed with incredible velocity; the citizens of Uruk pioneered world-changing technologies and experienced radically new ways of living, dressing, eating and thinking. The invention of the city on the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris unleashed a new, unstoppable force in history.
The end of the last Ice Age, approximately 11,700 years ago, profoundly altered human life on earth. Around the world, hunter-gatherer societies began to cultivate and domesticate wild crops that benefited from a warming planet. But it was the Fertile Crescent—a semicircle that stretches from the Nile in the west through to the Persian Gulf in the east encompassing modern Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, the south-east part of Turkey and the western edge of Iran—that provided the most favourable area for agriculture. This relatively small region contained a wide range of topographies, climates and altitudes, which in turn provided extraordinary biodiversity. Most importantly for human societal development, it contained the wild progenitors of much of modern agriculture—emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, barley, flax, chickpea, pea, lentil and bitter vetch—and large mammals suitable for domestication: cows, goats, sheep and pigs. Within a few millennia the cradle of agriculture became the cradle of urbanisation.
Archaeological work began in 1994 at Göbekli Tepe (Pot-Belly Hill) in Turkey under the direction of Klaus Schmidt. An extensive ceremonial complex, consisting of massive T-shaped stone pillars arranged in circles, was uncovered. This impressive site was not built by an advanced and settled agricultural community. The great twenty-ton stones were quarried and carried to the hill 12,000 years ago (construction of Stonehenge, in contrast, began 5,000 years ago). The discovery overturned conventional thinking. Here was evidence that hunter-gatherers congregated and cooperated on a truly massive scale. It is estimated that 500 people from different bands or tribes had to work together to quarry and carry the limestone megaliths to the hill. Their motivation was the worship of god or gods unknown to us and the fulfilment of sacred duty. There is no evidence that anyone ever lived at Göbekli Tepe: this was a place of pilgrimage and worship.
In the conventional interpretation, it was believed that such achievements came only after a surplus of grain freed up a portion of the community from the burden of daily subsistence and allowed them to do specialised, non-productive tasks. That is to say, after the invention of agriculture and villages. But Göbekli Tepe turns that thinking on its head. The earliest builders and worshippers on the hilltop were sustained by an amazing abundance of game and plants. That profusion of wild food, when it coexisted with a sophisticated system of religion, encouraged Homo sapiens to make radical changes to ways of life and tribal structures that had existed for over 150,000 years.
The temple came before the farm; it might even have made the farm necessary to feed a settled population devoted to worship. Genetic mapping shows the first ever domesticated einkorn wheat strains originated from a site twenty miles from Göbekli Tepe some 500 years after work began on the sanctuary. By that time, T-shaped pillars had been erected on hilltops in the wider area, and villages were established near them.
Göbekli Tepe lay preserved for modern archaeologists because it was deliberately buried for some unknown reason in about 8000 bc. No other such attempts at monument-building on this scale were attempted until the construction of the Sumerian temples in southern Mesopotamia 5,000 years later. In the intervening millennia the human population of the Fertile Crescent experimented with new ways of living.
The Neolithic revolution was fast. In around 9000 bc most people in the Fertile Crescent lived off wild foods; by 6000 bc agriculture had become established in the region. Hunter-gatherer tribes, with their varied diets and mobile lifestyles, gave way over the course of many generations to settled farming communities dedicated to cultivating a handful of staples and stock. Jericho began as a camp built by people who combined hunting with the cultivation of wild grains; within 700 years it was home to several hundred people who farmed emmer wheat, barley and pulses; they were defended by a stout wall and a tower. Çatalhöyük in modern-day Turkey, with a population in the seventh millennium bc of between 5,000 and 7,000, was a supersized community in prehistoric terms.
But neither Jericho nor Çatalhöyük made the jump to become cities. They remained overgrown villages, lacking many of the characteristics and purpose that we associate with urbanisation. Cities were not the product, it seems, of favoured locations, with lush and productive fields and access to building materials. Perhaps the living was too good. The land provided all that these communities needed, and trade made up any deficiencies.
Cities first appeared in southern Mesopotamia, on the edge of the Fertile Crescent. There was a long-standing theory explaining why. Here the soil and climate are not so favourable. Rainfall is low; the land is dry and flat. Only by harnessing the waters of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers could the potential of this wasteland be unlocked. People collaborated on irrigation projects to bring water from the rivers to create fields. Suddenly the land could produce huge surpluses of grain. Cities, therefore, weren’t the product of temperate, bountiful environments, but of harsher zones that pushed ingenuity and cooperation to their limits. The world’s first cities were therefore born in southern Mesopotamia out of the human triumph over adversity. At the centre stood the temple, and a priestly and bureaucratic elite that coordinated the transformation of the landscape and the management of a heavily concentrated population.
It is a compelling theory. But like so many of our notions of the early development of civilisation, it has also recently been revolutionised. The conditions that nurtured the roots of the city were altogether damper and more egalitarian.
The Sumerians, and the peoples who came to share their religion, believed that the first city emerged from the primordial swamp. Their stories talked of a watery world, where people moved about by boat; their tablets depicted frogs, waterfowl, fishes and reeds. Today their cities are buried under sand dunes in a bleak, inhospitable desert far from the sea and major rivers. Early archaeologists simply did not believe the myth of the swampy birth of these desert cities. But the fable of the amphibious origins of the city accords with recent discoveries about the changing ecology of southern Mesopotamia.
Climate change helped initiate urbanisation. In the fifth millennium bc the Persian Gulf rose about two metres above its current level, the result of the Holocene climatic optimum during which global temperatures shot upwards and sea levels rose. The head of the Gulf intruded 200 kilometres farther north than it does at present, covering the arid regions of southern Iraq with great expanses of marsh. These deltaic wetlands where the Tigris and Euphrates entered the Gulf became a magnet for migrants as soon as they were transformed by this altered climate. They contained a rich variety of easily obtainable, nutritious foodstuffs. The salt waters teemed with fish and mollusks; the lush vegetation on the banks of the rivulets and streams in the delta provided cover for game. This was not a place of one ecosystem, but of several. The verdant alluvial floodplain supported the cultivation of grains, and the semi-desert the herding of livestock. This delta sustained peoples who came from the various cultures of the Fertile Crescent; these incomers brought with them knowledge from the north about such things as mud brick building, irrigation and ceramic production. Settlers built villages on sandy turtleback islands in the swamp, making the land stable by constructing foundations of reeds reinforced with bitumen.4
Many millennia before, at Göbekli Tepe, foraging communities had taken advantage of their hunting paradise to construct something bigger than themselves. Something similar happened before 5400 bc on a sandbank beside a lagoon where the desert met the Mesopotamian marshes. Perhaps at first people saw this place as sacred because the lagoon was a life-giving force. The earliest signs of human life here, in the sandy island that would be called Eridu, were the bones of fish and wild animals as well as mussel shells, suggesting this holy spot was a place of ritual feasting. In time, a small shrine was built to worship the god of fresh water.
Over the generations, this primitive shrine was rebuilt, getting bigger and more sophisticated each time; eventually the temple rose above the landscape on a brick platform. The mixed bounty of wild and cultivated foods provided by the delta supported these ever more ambitious building projects. Eridu became venerated as the exact location where the world was created.
In the Sumerian belief system, the world was a chaos of water until the god Enki built a reed frame and filled it with mud. The gods could now take up their abode on the dry land created from reed and mud—in the same manner as the original marsh-dwellers had built their villages. Enki chose to found his temple at Eridu, where water became land. In order “to settle the gods in the dwelling of their hearts’ delight”—in other words, their temples—Enki created mankind to serve them.
